Oracle Blog

Wine, Cluster and Song

Friday Oct 16, 2009

For developers it is often convenient to have all tools necessary for their work in one place, ideally on a laptop for maximum mobility.

For system administrators, it is often critical to have a test system on which to try out things and learn about new features. Of course the system needs to be low cost and transportable to anywhere they need to be.

HA Clusters are often perceived as complex to setup and resource hungry in terms of hardware requirements.

This white paper explains how to setup a single x86 based system (like a laptop) with OpenSolaris, configuring a training and development environment for Solaris 10 / Solaris Cluster 3.2 and using VirtualBox to setup a two node cluster. The configuration can then be used to practice various technologies:

OpenSolaris technologies like Crossbow (to create virtual networking adapters), COMSTAR (to export iSCSI targets from the host being used as iSCSI initiators by the Solaris Cluster nodes as shared storage and quorum device), ZFS (to export a ZFS volume as iSCSI targets and as failover file system within the cluster) and IPsec (to secure the cluster private interconnect traffic) are used for the host system and VirtualBox guests to configure Solaris 10 / Solaris Cluster 3.2.

Solaris Cluster technologies like software quorum and zone clusters are getting used to setup HA MySQL and HA Tomcat as failover services running in one virtual cluster. A second virtual cluster is being used to show how to setup Apache as a scalable service.

The instructions can be used as a step-by-step guide to setup any x86 64bit based system that is capable to run OpenSolaris. A CPU which supports hardware virtualization is recommended as well as at least 3GB of main memory. In order to try out if your system works, simply boot the OpenSolaris live CD-ROM and confirm with the Device Driver Utility (DDU) that all required components are able to run. The hardware compatibility list can be found at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/. The role model for such a system is the Toshiba Tecra M10 with 4GB main memory.

If you ever had missed a possibility to just try out things with Solaris 10 and Solaris Cluster 3.2 and exploring new features - this is your chance

Friday Mar 06, 2009

If you have read the introducing blog about the new Zone Clusters feature, which got released with Solaris Cluster 3.2 01/09, then you might be also interested that a new blueprint has been published: Zone Clusters - How to deploy virtual clusters and why, again written by the techlead himself: Dr. Ellard Roush.

Solaris 9 Container support within the HA Containers agent - again developed as part of the corresponding project for Open HA Cluster

Clearly anyone deploying Solaris Cluster wants to achieve high availability for an application, or set of applications. Therefor I believe we can be proud on our rich data services portfolio for various standard applications!

Thursday Oct 16, 2008

In the past months I talked in various presentations about Open HA Cluster and Solaris Cluster. The emphasis has been set to give an introduction into the Solaris Cluster architecture and the fact that this product is now fully Open Source, describing the various possibilities to contribute and giving an overview about already existing projects.

Most talks started with a note that in order to achieve high availability for a given service, it is not just enough to deploy a product like Solaris Cluster. The same is true if you look for business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. Besides the service stack in the backend, it is not only necessary to analyze the infrastructure end-to-end to identify and eliminate single points of failure (SPOF), but also to have a close look at people (education), processes, policies and clearly defined service level agreements.

Thus I am happy to see a webcast hosted by Hal Stern about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, which gives a nice introduction about this holistic topic. More information can be found at a dedicated page about Sun Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Services.

Monday Jun 23, 2008

If you are still running applications on Solaris 8 using SPARC hardware and
maybe even using Sun Cluster 3.0, then you should get a plan ready to upgrade
to a more recent releases like Solaris 10 and Solaris Cluster 3.2 02/08.

In case you can not immediately upgrade to a newer Solaris release, Sun
recently announced the Solaris 8 Container, which introduces the solaris8 brand type for non-global zones on Solaris 10.
The packages
can be freely downloaded for evaluation and would require subscription for the RTU and support.

While the solaris8 brand type is NOT extending the support life for
Solaris 8, it allows you a phased approach for migrating to Solaris 10 and
leveraging new hardware platforms while the application still runs within a
Solaris 8 runtime environment.

Before going through the virtual to physical (p2v) migration, the existing Sun Cluster 3.0 configuration and packages need to get removed. See the Sun Cluster 3.0 System Administration Guide for more details on how to achieve that. This also means that there is no cluster framework running within the solaris8 brand type zone. Therefore existing standard agents can not be used. However, the sczsh component of the HA Container agent can be used to manage an application running within that solaris8 branded zone.

Of course any migration should get carefully planned.

The same works and is true for the recent announced Solaris 9 Containers. Patch 126020-03 introduces support for the solaris9 brand type for the HA Container agent on Solaris Cluster 3.2.

Wednesday Apr 02, 2008

Krish Shankar from ISV engineering published a very nice and detailed blog illustrating the deployment process of MySQL on a Solaris Cluster configuration. It also focuses on regression and failover testing of HA MySQL, and explains in detail the tests that were performed. Solaris 10 fully supports MySQL, and the HA cluster application agent for MySQL on Solaris Cluster.

This paper provides step-by-step instructions on how to install, create, and enable DB2 Universal Database (UDB) V9 for high availability (HA) in a two-node Solaris Cluster 3.2 environment. The article demonstrates how to use ZFS as a failover file system for a DB2 instance and how to implement DB2 failover across Solaris Containers in the Solaris 10 Operating System.

The data services were tested and verified in a joint effort between SWIFT and Sun Microsystems at the SWIFT labs in Belgium. Many thanks to the SWIFT engineering team and our Sun colleagues in Belgium for the ongoing help and support!

For completeness, here is the support matrix for SWIFTAlliance Access and SWIFTAlliance Gateway with Sun Cluster 3.1 and 3.2 software:

Thursday Oct 18, 2007

Finally Oracle now also certified RAC 10gR2 64 & 32-bit for Sun Cluster 3.2 running on the Solaris 10 x86/x64 platform. You can verify this if you have a Metalink
account, in the "Certify" column, clicking on the section "View Certifications by Platform", selecting "Solaris Operating System x86-x64" and then selecting "Real Application Clusters".

Saturday Jul 14, 2007

If you choose the "Secure by default" option when installing Solaris 10 11/06 (which is equal to run "netservices limited" lateron), then you need to perform the following steps prior to installing Sun Cluster 3.2:

Ensure that the local_only property of rpcbind is set to false:# svcprop network/rpc/bind:default | grep local_only

Wednesday Jul 11, 2007

Finally Oracle did officially certify RAC 9.2/10gR1/10gR2
64-bit on Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 SPARC running with Sun Cluster
3.2. You can verify this if you have a Metalink account, in the "Certify" column, searching in the section "Product Version and Other Selections: RAC for Unix On Solaris Operating System (SPARC)".

It is a detailed, step-by-step guide for installing the Solaris 10 11/06 Operating System, Sun Cluster 3.2 software, the QFS 4.5 cluster file system, and Oracle 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters (Oracle 10gR2 RAC). It also provides detailed instructions on how to configure QFS and Solaris Volume Manager so they can be used with Oracle 10gR2 RAC.